Material guide: agarwood oil, a wound response with twice as many suppliers for its imitations

In short: this record's data page is shorter than most, with large gaps. The gaps are themselves information: it is a natural complex material formed by infection, so there is no molecular weight and no logP.

Fields

Field	Value
CAS	94350-09-1
First synonym	volatile oil obtained from the whole plant, Aquilaria agallocha, Thymelaeaceae
Database category	fragrance agents
Natural/synthetic	natural
Occurrence	Aquilaria agallocha wood
Appearance	orange to green brown viscous liquid (est)
Flash point	61.00 C
Solubility	alcohol; water
Odour type	woody
Odour	sweet; agarwood; woody; balsamic; sandalwood; leathery; fruity; smoky; animal; tobacco
Suppliers	26
Cosmetic uses	skin conditioning; skin protecting agents
Oral toxicity	not determined
Note	This oil is water distilled from fungus infected wood of the tree Aquilaria Agallocha, growing in northeastern India

Fields that are absent: molecular weight, formula, logP, vapour pressure, melting point, boiling point, specific gravity, refractive index, substantivity, strength, shelf life, regulatory numbers.

That is not the database being lazy. It is a natural complex material with no single molecular weight, and most of the other physical fields are calculated or estimated from a single molecule.

(By comparison, thyme oil in the same library has specific gravity and refractive index, because those can be measured on the whole oil. Agarwood oil does not even have those, reflecting how rare it is and how inconsistent lots are: no common specification has been established.)

It is a wound response

The note field is the point: fungus infected wood.

Healthy Aquilaria heartwood is pale, light and nearly odourless. After infection the tree secretes resin, and the dark, heavy, aromatic part is agarwood.

Zhou and colleagues isolated three endophytic fungi from agarwood (Fusarium sp., Phaeoacremonium sp., Penicillium sp.) and compared essential oils from different formation modes in World J Microbiol Biotechnol in 2026. GC-MS identified 83 volatile metabolites, dominated by sesquiterpenes at 66.27% with chromones making up most of the rest. Fungal inoculation significantly increased sesquiterpenes and chromones (p < 0.05).

By relative odour activity value, the main contributors they identified were alpha-elemol, (+)-nootkatone, benzaldehyde, benzylacetone and ethyl 3-phenylpropionate, forming a woody-floral-fruity-spicy profile.

Ma and colleagues ran a time course in Frontiers in Plant Science in 2026, inoculating a high-efficiency inducing strain and sampling at 7, 14, 21 and 28 days with metabolomics and GC-MS. They identified 14,784 metabolites, of which 118 were agarwood-characteristic sesquiterpene skeletons and 2-(2-phenylethyl)chromones (PECs).

118 skeletons. That number is why a compounded replacer is a different thing rather than a worse version of the same one.

And another line from the Ma paper's opening matters more to a buyer: natural agarwood formation is slow, and the quality of artificially induced agarwood remains unstable.

Three odour fields

The library has three oud-direction records, and together they outnumber this one in suppliers:

	Suppliers	CAS	Odour field
agarwood oil (this one)	26	yes	sweet, agarwood, woody, balsamic, sandalwood, leathery, fruity, smoky, animal, tobacco
agarwood specialty	41	none	agarwood, woody, vetiver, balsamic, animal, earthy, amber, spicy, smoky
agarwood oil replacer	16	none	woody, vetiver, sweet, balsamic, animal, earthy, amber, smoky

Sandalwood, leathery and tobacco appear only here. Vetiver appears only in the other two.

And the replacer's odour field contains no instance of the word agarwood.

(Their occurrence fields read "not found in nature" for the specialty and "can be natural" for the replacer. Somebody on a forum judging a base as if it were oud is the subject of Rename Pretty Oud to Shitty Oud.)

"Almost all natural oud is adulterated"

The odour description field carries this comment:

"Oud, fresh-woody, balsamic, animal-barnyard. This is the real thing, beautifully complex and incredibly lasting. It was almost certainly adulterated somewhat at source because almost all natural oud is."

Not my sentence; one the database carries. It gives no proportion and no source.

What I can add is context: this is one of the few materials in the library with no specification fields at all (no assay, no specific gravity, no refractive index), and specifications are what catch adulteration. With no specification there is no way to check a delivery on paper.

(The compositional variability of naturals is computed in How much does a natural actually vary: across 806 molecule-by-botanical combinations, a median spread of 7.1-fold with more than four in ten exceeding tenfold. That statistic relies on content percentages, and agarwood oil has none.)

A different plant

The fourth record is agarwood oil (aetoxylon sympetalum), CAS 1333524-00-7, 2 suppliers.

Aetoxylon sympetalum is not Aquilaria. Locally it is gaharu buaya, and it is sometimes sold as White Oud.

Odour field: agarwood, aromatic, woody, umami, mossy, earthy, mushroom, smoky, animal.

Umami and mushroom do not appear in this record's odour field.

It has its own CAS, so it can be told apart on paper.

How to buy it

• Check the CAS. 94350-09-1 is the Aquilaria agallocha oil; 1333524-00-7 is a different plant; no CAS means a compounded product.
• There are no specification fields to check against, so you are relying on the seller and on GC/MS. This record has no assay, specific gravity or refractive index.
• It has no substantivity or strength field. Dosing has to be worked out by trial; the database cannot suggest an evaluation strength.
• The neat verdict is not how it behaves in a formula. This record's odour description is tagged at 100%.
• Artificially induced quality is unstable, which is the paper's own statement rather than marketing.

What this doesn't establish

• I have not smelled it. This is database fields plus two papers.
• "No specification fields" is the state of this record, not a claim that no supplier provides specifications. Most sellers of natural oils issue their own COA.
• "Almost all natural oud is adulterated" is a comment the database carries, with no proportion and no source, and I have not verified it.
• Zhou 2026 and Ma 2026 both studied artificially induced agarwood, using Aquilaria sinensis and one-year-old material. This record's source is Aquilaria agallocha from northeastern India, and neither paper answers whether the composition distributes the same way.
• The 83 volatiles and the 118 skeletons come from two different papers by two different methods. They cannot be added, nor do they verify each other.
• The three-way odour field comparison is not a controlled one. Different evaluators, different years.
• The 26, 41 and 16 are supplier entries this library recorded. One company may sell several types; I did not deduplicate.
• I did not run corpus statistics.